Proof That You Can Get Over Anything

There's a school of psychology which holds that happiness is subjective. Good or bad things happen in life, but people return to the same base level of happiness.
This theory, while up for debate in extreme cases, was established in regard to common life events by a 2008 article by Andrew E. Clark, Ed Diener, Yannis Georgellis, and Richard E. Lucas in The Economic Journal.

Studying twenty years of survey data from Germany, researchers found evidence that people adapt completely to marriage, divorce, widowhood, birth of child, and layoff.

Death of a spouse, for instance, is a terrible event characterized by a radical drop in happiness, but in the year that follows happiness rises, and within two years happiness returns to normal and may even rise above the baseline (as the subject gets caught in another hedonic cycle).

A similar hedonic pattern follows most negative events—and positive ones too. People get over it.

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